By the time business closed in the NBA on Wednesday, accountants for the Brooklyn Nets had to be a disheveled lot, their Van Heusens stained with sweat, their hair askew, their calculator fingers bruised.

In a span of just a few days, the Nets had committed to a little more than $310 million for seven players’ salaries over the next four years, a number that doesn’t include a multi-year deal for power forward Kris Humphries, said to be next on the team’s agenda. If Humphries gets a four-year deal, it’s safe to project that the Nets, in 2016, will have about $85 million going to six players. Assuming they round out the roster with a few midrange players that year, the Nets could be looking at a luxury tax bill of at least $25 million, probably more.

This, of course, is without Dwight Howard, who would have been the lynchpin for the Nets as a championship contender, joining the re-signed Deron Williams and the traded-for Joe Johnson. But with Wednesday's signing of center Brook Lopez—the key piece in the Nets’ attempt to pry Howard from the Magic—Howard has been removed from the equation in Brooklyn, leaving the Nets to stop wondering what’s possible with Howard on board and start contemplating how far they can get with what they have, and whether the price tag will be worth it.

Predictably, the guy with the most at stake here is pleased with how things have gone. When the dust settled Thursday, team owner Mikhail Prokhorov—who ultimately will pay that tax bill in four years—released a statement saying, “I’m thrilled with the way our team has come together. My congratulations and appreciation go out to general manager Billy King, assistant general manager Bobby Marks and head coach Avery Johnson for their tenacity, nerve and heart throughout this process. With the re-signing of Deron Williams and the trade for Joe Johnson, we go into our new home led by an All-Star backcourt and with every hope of a great season for the Brooklyn Nets. I can’t wait until opening night.”

Indeed, opening night will be a splashy event in Brooklyn, and that’s what Prokhorov has been after. Adding Howard would have been nice, but Prokhorov’s main ambition here all along was to ensure that, when he opened the Barclays Center this fall, people would show up.

He will have to pay heavily for the roster that has been constructed, but he will benefit, too—when he bought the team from developer Bruce Ratner, he also got a piece of the new arena, and a 20 percent stake in the massive Atlantic Yards project around it. Prokhorov’s goal here is to turn Brooklyners, many of whom protested the Yards from the beginning, into Nets fans as quickly as possible. Last year, Prokhorov also got a deal to double the team’s broadcast fees from the YES Network, from $10 million to $20 million, through 2032, and now wants the team (the least-watched in the league last year) to deliver ratings.

He wasn’t going to do any of that with the kind of roster that went 58-172 over the last three years in New Jersey. He wasn’t going to do that had the team’s first official summer as the Brooklyn Nets begun with watching Williams leave for Dallas.

It’s easy to deride the Nets’ moves this offseason as irresponsible overspending by an eccentric foreign billionaire who will see the error of his ways in due time, but that line of thinking represents a serious underestimation of Prokhorov’s business sense. He is going to make a lot of money off the Nets and the Atlantic Yards as a whole, as long as he can build a fan base quickly and keep the building full. That’s why the conventional logic about the impending tax bill doesn’t fit. There is more at stake for Prokhorov than running a basketball team.

Still, in order to draw fans, the Nets will have to win. This team will be good, but it won’t be the potential champion it would have been with Howard.

There is very little we can divine about where the Nets will rank in the league—in two years, for example, Williams and Lopez have played just 17 games together and the team has gone just 6-11 in those games. But a starting five of Williams and Johnson in the back court, Wallace on the wing, with Humphries and Lopez up front, and Teletovic, Reggie Evans and (unless he is dealt for a veteran) MarShon Brooks off the bench has to put Brooklyn on par with teams like the Celtics and Pacers as top challengers to the Heat in the Eastern Conference, assuming the Bulls struggle without Derrick Rose.

That will do. Later on, there will be bills to pay, and fans will rue some of the exorbitant contracts that King handed out in the two previous weeks—just try to find a team that will trade for Johnson in 2015, when he is 34.

It won’t matter, though. The Nets will be established in Brooklyn, with a fan base and a TV contract, and with the Atlantic Yards and the Barclays Center delivering hoped-for profits.

It will be a big bill for Prokhorov, but no worries. He will be making enough to pay it.